Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Toothpaste Caps

It's interest how similar configurations of the same geometric theme reoccur in varieties of shapes that we could easily mistake for others. At first glance the sharply creased pleats of this tapered, truncated cone could be any number of things, from lamps shades to cup cake liner to in this instance a toothpaste cap. The images above are the SLS out put of a model created in Zbrush. The images below are Zbrush renderings. There is a slight proportional difference between the art and the out put as seen here but, it is deliberate as the art work that I'd built the model over wasn't quite to the measurements specified in the drawing. This was pointed out to me by my vendor. In order to make the prototype comply with the spec dimensions, some adjustments were necessary, hence the slightly different appearance. Another interesting aspect of design and fabrication with these methods and mediums is scale. Having been told by the title of this blog that you're looking at a toothpaste cape, you may have assumed that the object pictured herein is perhaps an inch tall. Its actually 5" tall and 5.5" in diameter. It was designed as a form for a mold from which numerous casts will be made to adorn a very silly dental display.